Phonics and Reading

Phonics

At Sutton Benger School children in Reception and Key Stage 1 follow the synthetic phonics approach, using the 'Letter and Sounds and Phonics Play' programmes. It is an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letters or letter sounds are blended to form groups of letters or sounds, and those groups are then blended to form complete words. Children in Reception also use 'Jolly Phonics' actions to go with the sounds.

Our daily phonics sessions in Reception and Key Stage One are fun, involving lots of speaking, listening and games. The emphasis is on children's active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent play. We place our children into ability groups during phonics sessions ensuring that all children are able to participate in sessions that are at a level appropriate to their developmental phase.

Reading

At Sutton Benger School we feel that reading helps develop children's vocabulary, comprehension as well as their writing and spelling skills. Reading gives children access to the wider curriculum and the world around them and enriches their lives. It is our intention that all children leave the school as confident and competent readers and we use a combination of reading schemes. These include Oxford Reading Tree, Floppy's Phonics, Ginn and Rigby Star. Once they finish the reading scheme, we encourage them to become 'free readers' and chose their own books.

We also have a subscription to Curriculum Visions which is an online library of books to use with Ipads for individual and guided reading. These give a variety of fiction and non-fiction books to develop children's reading range.